Get the Ryzen 5 5500 at Ebay for £88 w/ code BAG20OFF
In terms of performance, the 5500 does fall behind the 5600 due to its smaller cache allocation and lack of PCIe 4.0 support, a consequence of the chip using a Cezanne APU design rather than the Vermeer design found in the rest of the Ryzen 5000 CPU lineup. (Basically, this is a Ryzen 5600G with the integrated graphics deactivated.) However, the 5500 is considerably cheaper than the 5600, so you get what you pay for I suppose! The Ryzen 5500 continues the theme of value with the inclusion of a bundled AMD Wraith Stealth cooler, which is serviceable enough for budget builds and especially 65W SKUs like the 5500. You might prefer to get a third-party cooler for lower noise levels at a given temperature, but even if you’re overclocking (which is supported here, on both CPU and GPU) the cooler is more than capable of keeping temperatures at reasonable levels. One benefit of going for a low-tier CPU like this is that it gives you plenty of room for an upgrade down the line, with the likes of the 5600X, 5800X, 5900X and 5800X3D all offering a significant boost in firepower for gaming and/or content creation while keeping the same motherboard, RAM and so on. So: a good price, I reckon, but you may want to target the 5600X which was on sale last week if you can afford the higher asking price - it’s faster and has access to PCIe 4.0, which unlocks better performance on a small number of graphics cards and allows for faster SSDs to be connected.
